Success story MLA
Meat & Livestock Australia Goes for Best of Breed Document Management with ITP from Aia Software
The customer
Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) is a producer-owned company that supports the Australian red meat industry with world-class marketing and research solutions. Its core activities include driving demand and market access for red meat sales, enhancing competitiveness and sustainability, and growing industry capability. MLA’s 250 staff are headquartered in Sydney with offices all over the world, from North America to Russia and Europe, to Bahrain in the Middle East and throughout Asia.
The question
“We decided to implement SAP ERP to improve management of our finance and project contract management functions, but the standard reporting capabilities offered by SAP were insufficient for our requirements,” said MLA Business Analyst and Project Manager, Amy Pritchard. “We needed a way to extract data from SAP into Microsoft Word to create customised contracts to provide greater flexibility in producing our many contract types in a standardised manner.”
The solution
“The ITP (Intelligent Text Processing) document composition platform from SAP business partner, Aia Software, was the only solution that was SAP NetWeaver certified to offer full integration with SAP and the ability to create custom documents in Word. ITP is flexible enough to allow us to do what we want and is much easier to use than our previous approach so more people are able to generate documents and make changes now,” said Ms Pritchard.
MLA implemented ITP as part of the initial phase of a multi-staged, enterprise-wide SAP ERP implementation in 2006. Users in management, finance, administration and project management access reports and contract documents via the company’s SAP Enterprise Portal, which integrates with the ITP online server. The COMPANY is now preparing to go live with SAP Workflow, sales and distribution, and business intelligence/warehousing.
The bottom line
“MLA has complicated contracting requirements which the standard SAP reports couldn’t accommodate. ITP gives us flexibility in customising contracts and generating automated reports for all our varied requirements, saving us time and effort along the way,” said Ms Pritchard.
With over 3,000 research partners and suppliers, MLA needs to tailor contracts for a wide range of applications and arrangements – everything from research into parasites affecting the beef industry through to the best ways to serve a particular cut of meat.
“Our contracts have to include objectives, purpose and description, milestones, pay rates and delivery schedules, along with our standard terms and conditions, although these can also vary from project to project, so the flexibility afforded by ITP is critical,” she said.